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Introduction

Welcome to Introduction to Critical Race Theory for 2017!

My name is Adrienne Keene, I’m an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. I am a white-coded Indigenous woman, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and I study Native students navigating the college process, as well as Native representations, which I write about on my blog Native Appropriations. I’m also active on twitter, which is probably how many of you are finding this site. After I posted my syllabus for this course on my academia.edu, there was a lot of excitement and interest around creating a space for folks to read through the texts together, so this site is meant to facilitate that process.

This course is a labor of love, and comes out of my experiences co-teaching Critical Race Theory in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education with Drs Kimberly Troung and Daren Graves, as well as support, insight, and beautiful assignment ideas from Dr. Leigh Patel. I am indebted to the hundreds of CRT scholars who have come before me and continue to do this work, and the dozens of students who have learned with me in the various iterations of this course. I’m by no means an expert, and am very much still learning right along with all of you this semester.

Course Description:

This graduate seminar will explore the foundations and central tenets of Critical Race Theory, from its origins in Critical Legal Studies, to current applications, debates, and evolutions, with particular attention to CRT’s intersections with the field of American Studies. We will also bring in CRT “offshoots” such as TribalCrit, LatCrit, AsianCrit, and DisCrit. CRT posits that racism is endemic to society, but that we must also remain committed to social justice and praxis. How do we navigate these tensions, use CRT to provide a toolkit for navigating scholarship, and work toward social change in the realms of race and racism?

How to use this site:

This site is meant to serve as an online interactive space and resource hub for those who would like to learn with the course this semester, but are not at Brown or able to take the course in person. Along the lefthand side of the blog you will find the syllabus, with links to many of the readings that are available online, as well as the Weekly Posts, that will offer discussion questions and links to PDFs of any readings not available online. The comments sections of these pages can serve as discussion spaces, as well as the hashtag #IntroCRT17on Twitter, with the week added (ie, #IntroCRT17 #Week2).

This class will not “meet” in any formal sense, this is meant to be a self-guided course. I will post any relevant powerpoints or materials, but our physical class at Brown is a seminar, so there aren’t typical lecture slides to share. The assignments are included if you’d like to participate, but with over 600 people subscribed to the course(!) I won’t be able to offer feedback or grades. I’m working on getting a forum up and running to facilitate discussions more fluidly, so will update when it’s ready!

For a broad overview of CRT and the central tenets, this is the powerpoint from the first week of class: Intro CRT class 1 2017

This is a work in progress, and my first time attempting something like this, so feel free to leave feedback or questions, and I’ll be updating as we go!